08 — East and West

How the memory and veneration of St. Poemen the Great passed into the whole monastic Church before its division — the East keeping him as Poimēn and making his sayings the bedrock of Byzantine and Slavic ascetic reading, the West translating his name to Pastor and folding the same sayings into the Verba Seniorum that St. Benedict’s Rule commends. This section traces that single inheritance and the unusual cult of a saint venerated through his words rather than at a shrine, framing East and West throughout as two channels of one undivided patrimony rather than as rival traditions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

Poemen wrote nothing and is venerated through a book — the Apophthegmata Patrum, in which his is the largest dossier. The history of his reception is therefore the history of how that body of sayings travelled. In the Greek East it became foundational monastic reading: gathered into the eleventh-century Evergetinos, copied in the Greek and Slavonic Paterika (the Skitskii and Azbuchnyi Paterika), and read continuously down to the present on Mount Athos. In the Latin West the same sayings crossed over as the Verba Seniorum of the Vitae Patrum (PL 73–74, the Pelagius–John translation), where Poemen appears under the translated name Pastor (“shepherd,” the exact Latin of his Greek name), and stands behind chapter 73 of the Rule of St. Benedict, which commends “the Lives of the Fathers” to every monk. His veneration follows the same pattern: a feast on 27 August, no relics and no vita, a Synaxarion drawn from the sayings, the generic iconography of the desert elder, and a Western commemoration of “Pastor” in the martyrologies. All of this is the patrimony of the pre-Schism, undivided Church — common ground, not contested ground (see Pre-Schism Church).

Files in This Section

File Description
Poemen in Monastic Memory The single inheritance in two languages: EAST — the Apophthegmata as the bedrock of Byzantine and Slavic monastic reading, the Evergetinos, the Greek and Slavonic Paterika (Skitskii Paterik / Azbuchnyi Paterik), and Mount Athos; WEST — the Latin Verba Seniorum / Vitae Patrum (PL 73–74, Pelagius–John), Poemen as “abbas Pastor” (the Latin translation of Poimēn/shepherd), Benedict’s Rule ch. 73 commending the “Lives of the Fathers,” and the Western florilegia and their influence on later spirituality. Framed as the common patrimony of the undivided Church.
Veneration The feast of 27 August (Poemen the Great, Hosios / Venerable); the unusual cult without relics, shrine, or vita — venerated through his sayings; his place in the Synaxarion; iconography as a desert monk-elder; commemoration in the East and in the Western martyrologies (the Roman Martyrology under “Pastor”), with calendar and which-Poemen disputes noted.

See Also

  • The Enduring Influence — Poemen at the heart of Orthodox ascetic literature and the Philokalic inheritance, of which this section’s reception history is a part
  • Feast and Cult — the feast of 27 August and the cult treated in fuller compass, with the collection’s final assessment
  • The Historical Poemen — the absence of a vita, the unrecorded death, and the Coptic-to-Greek-to-Latin chain behind the reception
  • Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church within which this common East-and-West patrimony was formed

References

  • The Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection, Poemen series — cited by saying-number in Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984). Greek text in PG 65.
  • Ward, Benedicta, S.L.G. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Poemen series; the note that Poemen appears in the Latin tradition as Pastor.)
  • Verba Seniorum / Vitae Patrum, in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 73–74. (The Latin recension of the Apophthegmata; the Pelagius–John translation; “abbas Pastor.”)
  • Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999 (French original Paris: Hachette, 1990).
  • Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, esp. ch. 5 and ch. 12.
  • The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 73, commending the Vitae Patrum. Cited in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. Timothy Fry, O.S.B. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981).
  • The Great Synaxaristes (Megas Synaxaristēs) and the Menaion for August, under 27 August — the liturgical commemoration of Poemen the Great.